


Metasanguine

by razielim



Category: Legacy of Kain
Genre: M/M, Mild Blood, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-11-27 02:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18188348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/razielim/pseuds/razielim
Summary: The six lieutenants and Kain muse upon the state of their fraternity.





	1. The Brother Melchiah

Melchiah had long been nauseated by the drinking of blood.

It seemed to leave him with an upset, a vague feeling of wrongness, a squirming in his gut that should have been left behind in his previous life. Perhaps it was the bloat. As last month's flesh rotted to its limits, some of the resulting gas escaped through his intricately sewn seams, but the rest remained trapped and he could hear it shifting capriciously, much like the inner workings of humans. What gas hadn't yet collected in pockets or wormed out through crevices proliferated within his flesh, turning it stiff and sore.

The blood exacerbated this feeling.

That glorious life force sunk into his veins, and, rather than settling into the hot embrace of his lustful hunger, it at once set to wrestling with his imperfections, attempting in vain to rejuvenate rotten flesh by its vivacious will and the dark will of the magic that animated him. At least that was how Melchiah imagined it. The repulsion had _started_ with the rotting.

Then again, it could be that the blood was rejecting him as a vampire, just as his own flesh did.

 _Not good enough_ , perhaps it meant to whisper in the tiny capillaries of his ears.

Melchiah was not prone to melancholy and refused to listen. He wasn't on this soil to live up to the sublime divinity of his master, he was here to serve and he was damn good at it. Soon, he would have to adjust what serving dutifully and reliably meant, for it was getting more and more difficult with each decade to hold a sword, but he was planning ahead. His territory had expanded, his builders had dug out new catacombs, new defenses, fortified his holdings and expanded production. Only Dumah, practical and hardworking, could be so competent at managing the affairs of his territory. The others — the pretty, the fierce, the wise, the treacherous — they had their own uses for the master, but it was Melchiah and Dumah who were the backbone of this empire, ensuring stability and security.

Still, it pained Melchiah to think that an age of change was coming. He would someday lose the industrious use of his hands. His bulk might grow to proportions that would leave him weak, unable to carry himself on his own two feet. What example would he give his fledglings then? Would they remain hard workers, seeing him giving everything to master and empire? Or would they take to pitying their own inevitably grotesque flesh, its pains and discomforts? What use would he be to the master then, neither body nor brood to offer? 

Melchiah let his fear of the future drive him. What fragile Rahab sucked out of books, he overtook by leagues through trial and error. Turel's impressive steam and steel industry and the war machine it supported sat upon Melchiah's brick and beam experiments, carried out on small scales until perfected. If he were to have nothing else left to offer, he would have his mind, worth five Rahabs and ten Zephons.

He would not be made obsolete by fate.

Melchiah had taken liberty sending several fledgings to apprentice with the Razielim tailors who pieced new flesh to his corpulence. Too long had he relied on the outside support of those incorrigible aesthetes to contain his flesh within its confines. It was time to adopt and improve.

His eldest brother may possess Kain's affection hidden away in a filigreed casket tucked under his silken bed, the only of the lieutenants who had never had to lift a finger to assure his own future security and standing, but he was the only one who still honored the shining image of family and fraternity that Kain had once assured them of, before the empire. Melchiah recognized the seething envy in his own heart and yet could not utter a treacherous word towards Raziel.

He was growing hungry again.

When the rot and the nausea had first appeared, he had thought to power through, that more blood would bring more health. It hadn't. Now he fasted. For days, for weeks, sometimes he fasted longer than a new piece of flesh stayed on his skeleton. It didn't make any difference. The blood animated him and he grew tired without it, but the rot had become a part of him, and the blood could tug and pull at his impurities with any amount of force and still only manage to heal the _sutures_ , welding the decaying flesh more tightly to him. Melchiah was tired of it. If it wasn't for the hunger and the master, he would have asked his eldest child to inter him in a war-abandoned catacomb decades ago, to waste away to nothingness until even his consciousness were to dim and fade.


	2. The Brother Zephon

His offspring had taken to climbing walls for no reason than the pure joy of it, often positioning themselves on windowsills to rest and take in the view before moving on.

Zephon had taken to shoving them out to plummet to a nasty sprawl of broken bones and tenderized flesh.

Each broken child, painfully reforming to full skeletal integrity over several days of agony, learned an invaluable lesson about watching his back. If they were smart, they also learned something about using their gift as a weapon or a shield, and not a leisurely luxury.

Zephon looked with optimism to the future. His brothers had scoffed when he proudly told them his clan was the first to evolve a new ability that even the master didn't possess. It wasn't just him who was so blessed, his whole lineage, down to the freshest fledglings straight out of the crypt, now possessed an uncanny knack for _sticking_. Turel told him not to bother Kain with such trivialities. Surly Melchiah said to go think of ways to better serve the empire with his gift. Dumah, as ever, had mocked him, and Rahab, the coward, had went along with it, though Zephon could plainly see the interest shine in his eyes. Raziel hadn't been present, presumably "serving the empire."

At first, the gift had been exhausting. Such strain and concentration was required for him and his eldest children to stay firmly affixed to a vertical surface. As decades passed and the gift was reinforced, they found themselves able to stay attached longer, with their center of gravity more leisurely held away from the wall. Zephon and his two eldest practiced swordplay on the walls of their recently acquired cathedral, trying to make one another fall.

When he'd told his brothers of this enhanced endurance and mobility, Melchiah raised his eyes thoughtfully and said he could use some Zephonim help with a project. The others maintained that it was nothing to tell Kain about. Raziel, deigning to be present though infuriatingly tousled, said nothing.

A week later, Kain had arrived in a flutter of bats just as Zephon had sent one of his children toppling several stories to at least a broken ankle. Doubtlessly Raziel's doing, the overbearing nuisance. Kain, however, was neither irate nor impressed at the development. The master sneered with only a hint of good humor and reiterated Melchiah's admonition to be useful with his "pranks." 

Zephon had seethed privately but the next night sent all the fledglings up on the walls to spar.

And now they swarmed the tower with growing endurance, sitting foolishly on sills but learning and honing all the same, his miniature empire swelling in strength and ability as his giftless brothers shuffled around in their own muck, drowning in the banality of their existence. As time marched into the future, it would be the Zephonim who would flourish and expand. Dumah and Turel, more brawn than brains, would fall first. Melchiah and Rahab, clever as they were, would take some thinking despite their exploitable weaknesses. Which would leave only the painted whore, attacking whom would be perceived as a direct attack on the master. Zephon would regroup instead, lure them in, let their own pride and arrogance ensnare them in poor judgement.

Yes, Zephon had plenty of optimism for a future that could not come fast enough.


	3. The Brother Rahab

Glorious night pooled between the ridges and the misty valley was again full of screaming, weeping, and soft whimpers.

Rahab had already had his nightly "bath" and would have three more before the sun rose. He strode past the camp's outliers distracting himself from the lingering agony in his scalded skin by watching the steam rise from the perforated caskets of his youngest offspring. His eldest children would dutifully bathe themselves after first seeing to their reluctant charges.

They'd lost Meridian, again.

And now he had the least territory of all the clans, moving from the shelter of one valley to the next like a transient pack of curs.

Higher and higher he climbed, until over the top of the mountain he could see a sky still navy with the setting sun. Below, his prize. Turelim were busy evacuating the abbey like so many ants. His brother meant to consolidate his power in the industries of his northeastern home now that nature had conspired to strip him of this stronghold, won only decades ago at such a high price.

Rahab had of course pulled this page out of Melchiah's book.

Contrary to what his brothers thought, he didn't fear getting his hands dirty or applying practical knowledge. After the crushing defeat at Meridian, where the humans had once again so successfully exploited vampiric fragility to water, his clan needed a home. Why fight or beg for one when a dozen shovels and a few fires could so easily wipe out centuries-fatigued infrastructure? 

Living in their new home wouldn't be easy. Centuries would pass before he and his offspring adapted fully. But Rahab could sense that things were changing. It was Zephon's gift that had shown him the way to a new future, but his brother was too enamored of his sly self-image to think past the obvious applications of a mutation. He had no wit to cultivate an advantage no other clan had the grit to suffer.

The Razielim, the Turelim, the Dumahim — great warriors in landlocked territories. How irreparably would their naive confidence falter if Kain sent them to lay seige to the likes of Freeport or Meridian? It was the Rahabim who had been sent to the hellish coast, and the Rahabim who had survived it. Gained and lost control countless times, but _survived_.

He'd been able to restrain most of his screaming this week. The water no longer cut through his muscle down to the bone, leaving him vulnerable for days, as it had when he had begun his self-flagellation, years ago, testing it on himself before directing his offspring to follow suit. The water could now only penetrate to the deepest layers of his skin. Agony, yes. Certainly exhausting. But it had paid off in the end. In just a few days, they would descend into the abbey, taking up residence in what was still dry, building infrastructure to cross what was yet inaccessible, and they would have little to fear. Yes, perhaps any fledglings that carelessly fell into the pools of their new home would still sink and burn, as lost as any Turelim, but Rahab and his eldest would survive such a fall. They would weather the pain and stay conscious long enough to pull themselves out, and they would grow stronger with every dip. A day would come when they would no longer take their baths by being locked in steel caskets, water poured in through the lid and drained slowly through the bottom. The fledglings would all gather to watch in holy reverence as he and his eldest would ceremoniously step into the black water, swim luxuriously and slowly through it, and rise, steaming and melted, but _powerful_.

Someday, he and his children would once more claim Freeport and Meridian, taking their rightful place as the most daring and most tenacious of all clans, and there would be nothing his brothers could do to challenge his territory or his supremacy. 


	4. The Brother Dumah

Dumah was hard at work.

There were armies to train, production to increase, control to consolidate. These occupations were constant. Five hundred years ago and five thousand years into the future, there would always be work to get done. The key was to enjoy the work and to subtly delegate work you hated to someone else.

That's why he wouldn't be caught dead doing Turel's work or Raziel's. Not even Kain's almighty bad temper could force him to do Rahab's work, mucking about in the misery of coastal conquest. He wasn't sure what benefit Zephon was to the empire, but he was certain he didn't want anything to do with Zephon's lot in life either. Even Melchiah's duties, so similar to Dumah's, were  _Melchiah's_ problem. Dumah had carved out exactly the role he wanted.

Perhaps jealousy was simply not in his repertoire. Dumah was familiar with pride and vanity and rage and all the rest, but seeing his brothers doing well for themselves stirred nothing in him. Nor did seeing them falter inspire glee. He wasn't a fool, and he didn't love all brothers equally, but neither did he care to twist himself into knots over differences in fortune when it was differences in _values_ that ruled the hearts of man and vampire alike.

It was this ease of temperament which allowed him to maintain effortless closeness with his sire, something the others coveted and failed to obtain. Kain, he'd learned over the centuries, was actually an immensely solitary creature who, both consciously and not, _resented_ demands upon his time and affection. The more his fledgling sons had reached for him, the more Kain had distanced himself. He rejected the industrious and inventive Melchiah, scorned the artful and mischievous Zephon, sent away the intellectual and earnest Rahab, and rebuffed the powerful and entitled Turel. All strong vampires with admirable traits that Kain valued, eternally damned by the one crime their god felt threatened by and could not forgive. Even Raziel, whom Kain allowed certain liberties... it was clear to Dumah that behind the veneer of romantic bliss lurked a deep hurt.

Dumah had never made the same demands of his sire. When Dumah had outgrown Kain's protection as a fledgling and sought out his independence, Kain continued to visit him on cool, moonlit nights and speak with him about philosophy, martial art, and politics as one might with a real son.  It had startled him to one day realize that the easy relationship was something he should keep to himself if he didn't want Zephon and Rahab to plot for his immediate demise. 

This liberating situation allowed him to appreciate Raziel as no other brother could—as indeed a brother. In fact, Dumah was unashamed to admit that he admired Raziel, not _despite_ his preoccupation with intangible concerns, but _because_ of them. As much as any of them, Raziel had taken upon himself only the lifestyle that appealed to him and discarded the rest. Raziel's interest in facades — their depiction and interpretation — made eternity bearable and somehow elevated. Beneath that, scorned or only condescendingly acknowledged by the others, lay the fundamental truth that Raziel's army, when it deigned to engage in conflict, was a class above anyone else's. The fascinating thing was that Raziel didn't aim to have a "better"army and that he didn't guard the secrets of his discipline jealously. He magnanimously allowed Dumah to tour and learn what he wanted and was interested to hear of Dumah's own adaptions. Raziel had incredibly high aesthetic standards, yes, but by feeding these impulses, he produced rigorously powerful results. To laugh at Raziel's tastes was to be blind to his unassuming genius.

Dumah, for one, had no intention of being blind to anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I mentioned to people in chat, Dumah's perspective and personal philosophy was hard to expand upon and examine in detail as his entire thought process can be summed up as:
> 
> _"Relationships? My relationships are fine because I'm not a jealous little bitch that gets all bent out of shape every time someone has better luck than me," thought Dumah and went back to drilling his youngest fledglings on the finer points of warcraft._


	5. The Brother Turel

Turel, when he stopped to think about it, was fueled by rage.

It was a general rage, aimed at the world at large, his most natural disposition, but it occasionally snagged on individual players. He only had to settle his attention on any one vampire to feel himself swell with the anger that had propelled him over the centuries to his great heights of achievement.

The easiest target to meditate his hate on had always been Raziel. Raziel, who by his very existence, embodied all the love that Kain had withheld from Turel and his younger brothers. There was little redeeming about the eldest — his arrogance was surpassed only by his uselessness. If any of the rest of them had been as preoccupied with beauty and refinement as Raziel, Kain would have cast them into the abyss centuries ago. Incredible what you could get away with when you had a pretty face and a prettier backside. 

Then there was the master himself. Desperate as he had been to outdo Raziel in Kain's eyes, Turel had come up with solutions undreamed of, executed industry unheard of. He had conquered the most difficult of territories, waging the bloodiest of battles. On these lands, he built infrastructure that benefited the entire empire. His smoke stacks allowed sun-sensitive fledglings of all clans to get battle-ready at a younger age. His weapons were in the hands of every vampire. And yet it still failed to be good enough for Kain.

Dumah was another insult altogether. Step for step, he seemed determined to do everything Turel had achieved but better. A copycat without a single original idea whose half-assed efforts somehow won more praise from the master than the genuine article. His quaint homesteads with their export of human resources continued to be lauded as the production powerhouse of the empire, though it had been _Turelim steel_ that had won and secured the empire's victories. No one praised the might of the Turelim army without slipping the Dumahim into the same breath.

Then there were the other three — weaklings and invalids, squabbling among themselves, falsely believing they deserved an equal piece of the pie. Rahab was such a failure he didn't even _possess_ a territory since losing Meridian for the seventh time in five centuries. Now he shuffled about in the mountains like a vagabond, living off the scraps the cretin Melchiah threw him. Zephon, always unreliable at best, had become downright intolerable since he'd learned that walls have cracks and could support the weight of wastrels.

In a room with the lot of them, Turel's ears seemed to fill with a high-pitched whine that made it hard to think straight. Every laugh, every scrape of claws on stone his brothers made seemed to grate at Turel's very soul. With monumental effort to control himself, he distilled his frustration, indignation, and hostility into curt answers and straight questions. The others thought him humorless, unfeeling, only as deep as the haughtiness they were privy too. Somehow, knowing that enraged him further.

Which is why, more often than not, Turel chose not to put words to what fueled him.

Without words, his self-destructive anger turned to powerful fire, driving him, pushing him to climb higher. When he didn't stop to think, it didn't matter whether Kain credited him, Raziel overshadowed him, or Dumah undermined him. He merely _climbed_ , exhilarated and gasping for breath, to the pinnacle of existence, the very limits of what it meant to be vampire. There was peace in the climb, in designing factories and drawing battle plans, the way there never could be any peace in interacting with his loathsome "family."

Caught up in the moment, there was no past or present, no love or hate, only his own divinity.


	6. The Brother Raziel

Raziel held no illusions.

He knew quite clearly that Turel all but choked on resentment at the very sight of him, that Rahab was as pained as he was proud to have been sent off for the coast, that Zephon would murder them all given the chance but would save Raziel for last and savor his death more than anyone's. He knew that even Melchiah, grateful as he was for Raziel's affection, secretly ached with envy. Raziel knew it all and ignored it. 

Gone were the days when it was only him and Kain against the world, but Raziel knew his yearning for those idyllic days would never leave him. What did it matter if the others pictured his position as perfect? What weight did their jealousy hold against the heaviness of his longing? 

When he had been first raised into the pains and delights of this world, there had been no barrier between him and his sire. Kain shared everything with his beloved fledgling — his interests and joys as well as his fears and strategies. In turn, Kain had allowed and indeed encouraged Raziel to lay as an open book before him. All of his deepest reflections were submissively handed over for to Kain to examine, reprimand, praise. There had been a lot of learning back then. Kain had insisted that Raziel inhale stacks of books at inhuman speed and speak on them fluently, as though he were a human aristocrat to be presented to high society. There were endless practical lessons to move and think like Kain while hunting. They would gore one another every night, or rather, after Kain would destroy Raziel's flesh and bone to within a hair's breadth of oblivion during training, he would allow Raziel's nascent claws to dig into him vengefully during their lovemaking.

Not that it was all blood, education, and blasphemy.

They had been playful, then, _free_. Kain had been unwilling to lunge headfirst into the conquering of the world, having carved out a small piece of heaven for himself and his experiment of vampiric fatherhood. Stratagems and politics were merely topics to juggle between each other, lovemaking was as frequently vulnerable and quiet as it was passionate and depraved. Back then, Raziel had no idea of the weight of eternity or the burdens of power. Kain himself, having experienced but a taste of these things, seemed determined to stave off their full repercussions as long as possible, to savor one last breath of fresh air before stepping into the cage conquest would prove to be.

His first sibling had changed all that. Turel had been willful from the first, angry at the world and frequently directing that anger at his two caretakers, rebelling against their rules and denouncing their shared wisdom. Kain's temper at this insolence cooled his affection even for Raziel. Dumah had been made on a nihilist whim of Kain's and not after premeditation like the first two brothers. They were more fortunate that time, and Dumah rose to this world with an even keel — patient, curious, and deferential to both sire and eldest brother. Turel had reacted to the addition poorly, acting out in ways that soon had the local humans rallying together to pursue the heretofore invisible threat. As Freeport began to churn out vampire hunters for the first time in centuries, Kain left Raziel in charge of keeping his brothers alive and run off to make one last child before their retreat to a more peaceable portion of the world. But Turel had refused Raziel's authority, riddling him with doubts over his own competence, and Kain had not come back with only _one_ child. It was during that chaotic flight North to the land that would one day become the Sanctuary that Raziel realized he had become somehow _bereft_ of all that had been. He was no longer Kain's other half, his lover and his future equal. The presence of five younger brothers had shifted Kain's perspective. He was now alone at the pinnacle of the world, and Raziel was a step below, lumped together with these mewling children who could hardly feed themselves.

Approaching Kain on the matter had yielded a detailed and painful rebuke. _Had Raziel not been listening all this time? Had he not the imagination to understand what needed to be sacrificed to build a new empire with no resources but their own enhanced natures?_ It went on until Raziel begged him to stop, pledging his unerring devotion to Kain's vision.

After that, there had been no more hypotheticals or lovemaking. Not for centuries. Raziel no longer had the luxury of weighing ideas against one another; he made decisions. His younger brothers became his fellow lieutenants. They were put on their feet, developed according to their skills, and deployed upon the world. Kain gave orders, expressed visions, and Raziel deconstructed them into delegated reality. Turel's anger, uncontrollable, was funneled into war and progress. Dumah's reliability and pride were developed into bountiful production. Rahab's tenaciousness and inventiveness were directed towards the coast where even Kain himself was at a loss at how to maintain a military presense. Zephon's stingy vanity was poked and prodded until it dwarfed his laziness, and the family's chronic under-performer began to achieve feats that were impossible with more direct means. Melchiah, serious and loyal, was supported and assured of his worth, allowing the youngest brother to achieve mastery unattainable to the others.

Sitting in his gilded war room, surrounded by generals and philosophers, artists and scribes, Raziel had used everything Kain had taught him, driven relentlessly by that haunting lecture.

It was only then, after so much land had been won and Kain's foul tempers over the pace of progress had subsided, that Raziel had dared to sit back and breathe. He woke as if from a deep sleep to see that the empire their long-abandoned intimate conversations had laid the plans for had become a reality.

Raziel tied off loose ends. He dismissed the affairs of the other clans from the plate of his concerns, unshackled himself from Kain's vision, and set to further developing his own neglected ideals and aesthetics. Turel would forever attribute the gains Raziel achieved in that era to luck, but with his hands free for the first time since his sibling's birth, to Raziel it was mere child's play to conquer a more massive territory than all his brothers combined. His own bloodline had come out of the chaos of the empire's origins rigorously educated in strategy and meticulous in their practices. As they marched north, not a single stronghold, fortified with centuries of fear, could withstand their tactics.

It was towards the end of this perfunctory gesture of dominance that Kain returned to him. He remained surly, prone to fits of explaining his motivations and the importance of the empire, as if aware of his own feelings of guilt but unable to verbalize them, fearful of drawing attention to his _own_ weakness by addressing  _Raziel's_. A new sense of equality bloomed in Raziel as he saw for the first time that Kain had always harbored his own insecurities, his own doubts between right and wrong. He put his sire at ease, donning a mask of invulnerability. He welcomed Kain to his bed where a newfound sensuality blossomed, one that was at home in the gleaming halls of the Razielim stronghold and his silk sheets. Their relationship had matured and hardened with experience. Intellectually and physically intimate, but with a thick wall of predatory instincts, they now regarded one another as dangerous creatures. Privately, Raziel's whole soul ached to reclaim that past innocence. Outwardly, he entertained Kain in his chambers as one would a rival emperor. Gracious and yielding to his guest, but bold and entitled. Kain, feeding off these ineffable promises of mutually-bolstered masculinity and dominance, could no longer stay away.

The others felt jealous. That was their problem.

They were derisive of how Raziel ran his territory and trained his fledglings. That was their loss.

He had served his sire faithfully and relentlessly. He had sacrificed himself in ways none of them could comprehend, not even Kain and the ever-perceptive Dumah, and he would continue to do so for all eternity, righteously cutting a path through all obstacles that stood in Kain's way.

Anything to keep Kain from discarding his love ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Raziel, as ever, verbose. No regrets.


End file.
